Overview
Design
Frontend
Fullstack
Create Website
Blog
Frontend
Book 🚧
->
1. Getting Started 🚧
->
1.1 Hello, Github!
Docs
Book 🚧
Learn
The Book Of fastn
i Foreword 🚧
ii Preface
iii Introduction
1. Getting Started 🚧
1.1 Hello, Github!
1.2 Let’s Create A Repo
1.3 Publish Your Site
1.4 Online Editor
1.5 Edit Your Site 🚧
2. Modules 🚧
Appendix
a HTTP 🚧
b URL 🚧
c Terminal
d Common Commands 🚧
e Install fastn
f A Programming Editor
g Hosting 🚧

Hello, Github!

Github is an online collaboration platform, where developers come together and write software. Github is not the only one, there is Gitlab, BitBucket and a few others. Or you can even run your own code collaboration platform, after all that’s what software developers do, they are not bound by other companies to provide the solutions for their need, but can build our own. Among these, Github is kind of the most popular one, and there is no harm in learning, so even if you did not end up using Github, the same basic ideas will apply.

There is one more reason to consider Github, a lot of open source development happens on Github. And Github profile of software developers act like their resume, some companies look at your Github work history while evaluating you during their recruitment process. While this is not free from controversy, after all your best work may not be public, so how can you be properly evaluated based on your public profile, it still makes sense to stack the odds in your favour, and learning in public is a very good way to learn for some.

So Github, Github uses something called git underneath. git is the real brain, and Github is kind of on top of it. In fact the others I mentioned, Gitlab, BitBucket too support git, so as you see if you learn git, you can use any of these.

So you have to learn both git and Github if you want to do programming. And we will, very gradually, over the course of this book.

Why Don’t People Write Code In Google Docs/Dropbox etc?

A lot of early programmers ask this question. After all Google Docs, and Apple Notes, etc are great at collaboration. Of course Google Docs does not store program files, which are plain text files, but they have, a proprietory “rich text format”, same with Apple Notes etc.

But how about Dropbox, Google Cloud, iCloud etc? They let you store files, including plain text files, and sync them across different machines. Even support sharing folders with multiple users, so any number of people can work on the same set of files.

Why do we need these more complex git and Github at all?

It is all about conflicts. See if you share some files among people. Or even if you are the only one editing those files, but if you are editing those files from different devices, say you have a laptop and a desktop. Or since you are going to develop software, which is going to “get deployed on SERVER”, you are going to have more than one device or more than user editing those files.Or even tabs! You may have opened the same file on multiple tabs or multiple applications on the same device! This is kind of unavoidable. And if there are going to be more than one devices or users, there is going to be conflicts.

What Are Conflicts?

So what is a conflict? Conflicts arises when the same file is edited by multiple people, or on multiple devices by the same person. Let’s look at an example. Say at the beginning of the day, there was a file named employees.ftd, which looked like this:
content of employees.ftd at the beginning of the day
-- employee: John Smith
salary: 2000

-- employee: Jane Doe
salary: 3800
Lang:
ftd
So this file keeps tracks of employees and their salaries. And let’s assume that you are Jane Doe, and you went ahead and had a chat with your manager about a raise. You present an excellent case, you tell them you have just learnt fastn and ftd and are now more skilled, and are thus more valuable to the company, and manager decides to give you a raise of 7%. The manager downloads the latest version of employees.ftd and updates it with your new salary:
employees.ftd after manager gives a raise
-- employee: John Smith
salary: 2000

-- employee: Jane Doe
salary: 4066
Lang:
ftd

Congratulations on the raise! But before the manager can finish uploading the updated file, something else happens!

The CEO of your company has seen the quarterly numbers, and decided to give everyone in the company a 5% raise, so he downloads his employees.ftd before the manager has uploaded his updated version.
CEO also sees the employees.ftd that was at the beginning of the day
-- employee: John Smith
salary: 2000

-- employee: Jane Doe
salary: 3800
Lang:
ftd
Gives everyone a 5% raise and makes it:
After the 5% raise
-- employee: John Smith
salary: 2100

-- employee: Jane Doe
salary: 3990
Lang:
ftd

Now there are two new versions of the employees.ftd. For John there is no conflict, the manager does not want to do anything with the salary of John, and CEO want’s to increase the salary. But in your case, Jane’s case, manager want the salary to be 4066, but the CEO wants the salary to be 3990, what should be the new salary?

Should it be 3990 as per the CEO because CEO has higher priority? But that will effectively lower Jane’s salary from 4066, and had he known her new salary was raised, would he have lowered it, and made Jane’s increment same as John? Especially if he learns that the manager thinks Jane deserves the increment?

The point I am trying to make is this is a situation of conflict, and there is no simple answer here. Maybe the CEO’s 5% increment should be applied on top of the 7% raise by manager as Jane deserves both? The software can not decide this. Ideally the manager, the CEO, maybe the HR, maybe including Jane should come together and decide what should be her new salary.

This is real life. This happens more often than you think. Let’s look at another example. Say you are organising an event, and are looking for guest speakers. Say so far you have found one speaker and at the beginning of the day, the speaker list file looks like this:
speakers.ftd
-- speaker: Abraham Lincoln
Lang:
ftd
And Jack and Jane both go looking for new speakers, and Jack gets Mahatma Gandhi to speak, but he decides Gandhi should come after Lincoln after studying the demography of the audiance, so he updates his speakers.ftd:
Jack’s speakers.ftd
-- speaker: Abraham Lincoln
-- speaker: Mahatma Gandhi
Lang:
ftd
In the meanwhile Jane has managed to convince Plato to speak as well, but she also decides Lincoln should go first based on careful considerations, and her file looks like this:
Jane’s speakers.ftd
-- speaker: Abraham Lincoln
-- speaker: Plato
Lang:
ftd
Now we again have a conflict! The order of the speaker matters. So when these changes should be combined, or “merged” as they say in programming world, should the final file look like:
Option one: Plato goes first
-- speaker: Abraham Lincoln
-- speaker: Plato
-- speaker: Mahatma Gandhi
Lang:
ftd
or, should it look like this:
Option one: Gandhi goes first
-- speaker: Abraham Lincoln
-- speaker: Mahatma Gandhi
-- speaker: Plato
Lang:
ftd
And there you go, conflict again! Such conflicts are everywhere.
If conflicts was Thanos, he would have said: Dread it. Run from it. Conflicts arrives all the same. I am inevitable.

How To Resolve Conflicts?

At the most fundamental level one can take the position that there is basically two ways to resolve conflict, assume conflicts are irrelevant, let the software pick either of the two versions as the “winner”, maybe the last write wins, maybe the longest change wins, maybe even there is a priority on the user, CEO wins over the manager etc. Any such heuristics can be picked and one can go on with life.

If the stakes were low. This is what Google Docs and Dropbox/iCloud etc do. They use a heuristic, which one? Decided by their product team, and silently resolve the conflict. User is not informed about the conflict, and people go on their blissful ignorant merry life. Butterflies and rainbows everywhere, no conflict in sight. Life is good.

But is it really? If Jane hears CEO decreased her raise from 4066 to 3990, despite company having a great last quarter, possibly because of the hard work put by Jane, she is obviously sounding like a go getter, trying new things and all, would she like it? Would the CEO like it that her top performer is disgruntled, and looking for job elsewhere, because some product manager in Google Docs team decided last change wins?

How about the event they were organising, if they are really lucky, the order in which the speakers peak does not matter to the audiance, but what if it mattered? Would the event organising team be happy about the face that some spreadsheet software decided what the order should be? Of course you can say if the decision was so important, the event planning team should have double checked! And they should have, but shouldn’t the software warned them that there is a conflict instead of silently deciding the order in which speakers should speak?

See, the thing is if Google Docs team used Google Docs (say they modified it to also store programming source files), to store Google Docs’ source code, or if Dropbox team used Dropbox to manage their source code, both Google Docs and Dropbox products would be down all the time, or worse, would lose data, and do all sorts of bad stuff.

Google Docs or Dropbox will never use Google Docs or Dropbox for storing source code. Because source code is important. It is a tragedy that CFOs use such products to store their highly sensitive data, they must be double and triple checking everything like a kid on suger rush, or must be losing their hair.

We simply can not let software decide what to do in conflicts. Humans have to be brought in the loop, and they have to take a look at the history, the motivations of the two people making conflicting changes, and conflict has to be properly resolved, and the resolution has to be fed to the software for storage purpose etc.

This is how software is written. This is also quite hard, the reason non software fear this hard step, is why you should read this book and learn to do things the right way.

Let’s take a look at what Github does when it detects a conflict:
How Conflict Should Be Resolved

Source: Resolve simple merge conflicts on GitHub

Notice again how they prominently show a warning:

It shows there is a conflict, the conflict does not get silently ignored. This warning force a human in the loop. A human has to click on the “Resolve conflicts” button, and look at the two possible versions, and decide what wins.

This keeps code sane. Conflict forces us to think. They are sometimes quite nasty to resolve, but that is reality of life, and not a problem with the software. Not to say software always works, sometimes there are conflicts that software could have resolved but can not, that will happen. But then we programmers are paranoid people, and prefer to play it safe, and are okay to be warned when there is no real problem, if our only other choice was for all warning to go silent.

git is a version control system

Now that we have discussed the motivation of why we go through this slightly, and in practice it ends up not being a big problem as you will see, resolving conflict with right tools at hand, and some basic knowledge is easy most of the times.

So if you like version control system, currently the most popular solution is git. git was built by Linus Tarvold, the same guy who created Linux! It’s pretty cool, but has a learning curve. There used to be others, cvs, Subversion, Mercurial, but they are largely overshadowed by git today and a lot of software companies are using git. Github and Gitlab have even git in their name, the two most popular code hosting solutions today, so you can imagine the popularity and prominence of git.

git is notorious in being hard to learn, but do not worry, we will learn only beginners part in this book, and whatever you need at that level we will explain here.

Create A Github Account

If you are finally convinced git and Github are worth giving a try, you can start with creating an account on Github if you do not already have one.

Note: This book or fastn, or FifthTry, the company behind it are not in any way affiliated with Github. We use Github ourselves, and quite love it. Further we know these two best, and we have done work to make your life easier if you are using Github. If you want to use something else, please get on our discord server and discuss your use case, and help us support other version control system and other code hosting platforms better.

Creating account on Github should be very straightforward. Go to github.com:

And create your account. While you are creating an account on Github you have to pick a username, do pick your username with care as you would be sharing it a lot with others, companies you work in future etc. It should not be any more difficult to create an account on Github than most places you have created an account, Facebook, Gmail etc. When they ask you select “Continue with free”, free is good enough most personal usage and the purpose of this book.

If you are done with creating your account on Github you can move on to the next step and create your first website. ->

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